Bryan Fischer is a Dolt (Good Injun Edition)

Bryan, you just can’t stop when you’re behind.

After writing a post for the AFA … er, excuse me, on the AFA website, but disavowed by the AFA, ahem … about how the Native Americans deserved to have their land taken by the Europeans because they were brutal, savage, pagan perverts (just like the Canaanites), you found, Bryan, that people just couldn’t handle the truth and the AFA had to yank the post down.  Even though you argued that you’d been correct, but the nation just isn’t mature enough to hear the truth, you seemed willing to let sleeping rabid dogs lie.

Yeah, I  know, that drew a chuckle from me, too, Bryan.  Because, as we’ve seen with Gays and Muslims, once you sink your teeth into a target, you’re never willing to let go until said target is stoned on the outskirts of town.

Thus, today’s bit of let’s-carry-on-the-argument-I-said-we’d-drop, “Pocahontas shows what might have been.”

Yes, you went there.

Pocahontas was the daughter of a powerful native American chief, Powhatan, at the time of the settlement of Jamestown. According to John Smith, Pocahontas intervened to save him from certain death at the hands of her own father.

Yes, Bryan, we’ve all read the elementary school history, as well as seen the Disney movie.  That Smith didn’t record this tale until long after it supposedly happened, and told a similar story about being similarly rescued from the Turks in Hungary, casts a bit of doubt on the whole foundational tale, Bryan.

She also did much to help the early colony of Jamestown avoid both starvation and attack from the surrounding tribes, by bringing both food and information during what became known as “the Starving Time.” In fact, John Smith subsequently said that, “next, under God, [she] was still the instrument to preserve this Colonie from death, famine and utter confusion.”

Pretty remarkable for a woman who was only ten when she saved John Smith (who was 42).

She subsequently was captured by English settlers, who intended to exchange her for English prisoners who had been taken into captivity by the Algonquins, or Powhatans, who also helped themselves to various weapons and tools. The Powhatans, along with many of the indigenous peoples, seemed to have little respect for private property, including boundaries, and little regard for obedience to the eighth commandment and its prohibition against stealing. (On the Oregon Trail, the primary problems travelers suffered from the indigenous peoples were not massacres but thievery.)

Yes, well, theft and stealing and taking of various things (coughLANDcough) seems to be pandemic among, oh, humans.

Chief Powhatan released the prisoners, but did not return the weapons and tools which his people had stolen, so the English held on to Pocahontas. During a chance encounter with the Algonquins, Pocahontas rebuked her own father, accusing him of valuing her “less than old swords, pieces, or axes,” and informed him that she preferred from that time forward to live with the English.

During that year-long wait, she was treated with “extraordinary courteous usage,” according to colonist Ralph Hamor. A local minister by the name of Alexander Whitaker taught her about Christianity and helped her to learn English. She became a follower of Christ, was baptized, and took the Christian name “Rebecca.”

Hey, Bryan, how would you feel about an American Christian woman held captive (even well-treated while in captivity) by Muslims who, over time, rebuked her father for not giving into the demands of her captors, and converted to Islam, taking on a new name and marrying one of her captors.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

The rotunda of the United States Capitol since 1840 (before political correctness began radically distorting American history) has featured a huge mural by John Gadsby Chapman which pictures the Christian baptism of Pocahontas.

The explanatory note that accompanies the reproduction of this painting on the website of the architect of the U.S. Capitol indicates that Pocahontas, or Rebecca, “is thought to be the earliest native convert to Christianity in the English colonies.”

Yes, remarkable that Christians in the mid-19th Century, in the midst of ongoing conflict with the Native Americans, would seized on to a mythologized Indian woman who converted to Christianity as an exemplar of what they wished all the Indians would do.

I’ll leave it to the reader how realistic they think the painting actually is.

Her marriage to John Rolfe shortly after her baptism into the Christian faith established peaceful relations between the Tidewater tribes and the early colonists until her death in 1617.

Yes, intermarriage often calms diplomatic problems.

But Chapman included, in the shadows of the painting, intimations of trouble to come. Pocahontas’s regally dressed brother turns his head away from the ceremony, while an uncle of Pocahontas sits sullenly on the floor, refusing even to watch. Upon Powhatan’s death in 1618, this uncle replaced him as chief and led the Pamunkey River massacre of 1622 in which 347 colonists, about a third of the population, were cut down in cold blood.

Which massacre was driven by colonists encroaching on their lands and the murder of said uncle’s chief advisor.  Y’know, kind of like that whole “illegal aliens” thing the Right keeps getting so stirred up about.

After her baptism and wedding, Rebecca traveled to England with her new husband, where she was honored and feted as a princess, the daughter of a king in the New World. She met King James, the King James of Bible fame, while there.

She was feted as a princess, though she actually wasn’t.  She was also great publicity for the Virginia Company as an example of an Indian who was not hostile, increasing the chances that folks would sign up to sail to the colony.

John Smith, who by then was living in England, wrote to Queen Anne in anticipation of Rebecca’s visit, remarked on her “present love to us and Christianity,” and urged the Queen to treat her well during her time in England. And treated well she was.

Interestingly, Pocahontas had been told that Smith was dead, before discovering he was alive after she arrived in England.  Smith’s letter to Queen Anne was less generous than a warning that mistreatment of Rebecca might lead to renewed hostility back in the Americas.

Rebecca reunited with Smith during her stay in England, although she apparently was miffed he hadn’t stayed in touch. But she told him forthrightly, “I tell you then,…you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman.”

Actually, there’s a very weird interchange between the two of them where she calls him “father” and he dislikes the title because he believes she outranks him in royalty.  Plus, it kind of highlighted how he was 30-odd years older than her.

It’s arresting to think of how different the history of the American settlement and expansion could have been if the other indigenous peoples had followed Pocahontas’s example. She not only recognized the superiority of the God whom the colonists worshipped over the gods of her native people, she recognized the superiority (not the perfection) of their culture and adopted its patterns and language as her own.

Yes, if only the Europeans had kidnapped and held hostage among them all of the Native Americans, then they might have come, Stockholm Syndrome-wise, sympathetic to their captors and converted to their religion.

Instead, those silly Europeans decided it was easier to simply exploit any hospitality they received, and then take the lands they wanted, killing any Native Americans who got in the way. Those who survived, converted or not, could always be shuffled off to another tract of land, further away. Certainly, Christian or not, they weren’t fit for European company.

Yeah, those silly Indians.

In other words, she both converted and assimilated. She became both a Christian and an American (technically, of course, an Englishman). She melded into European and Christian civilization and made her identity as a Christian and an Englishman her primary identity. She was the first manifestation of what became our national slogan, “E Pluribus Unum,” “Out of many, one.”

Except that “Out of Many, One” implies that the “One” carries aspects of all the “Many,” not just aspects of the “One” that’s in charge.  That would be like a Rhode Islander arguing that “E Pluribus Unum” meant that folks from Massachusetts and Virgina both should be more like Rhode Island.

By the way, didn’t Obama come under fire from the Right, Bryan, for mentioning that “national slogan” as our “national motto,” rather than the official motto adopted in the 1950s, “In God We Trust”?  Sounds like he got his slogans and mottos mixed up, right, Bryan?

Had the other indigenous people followed her example, their assimilation into what became America could have been seamless and bloodless. Sadly, it was not to be.

So had all the Native Americans converted to Christianity, and learned to speak English … the Colonists would have left them alone and not taken their land?  Really, Bryan? That’s … a remarkable speculation.

Pocahontas was the Rahab of the American continent.

Oh, here we go with the “Native Americans as Canaanites” schtick again.

Um, Brian, in case you hadn’t notice, even if one grants the idea that the Canaanites were the on the wrong side of God’s scorecard because he promised the Holy Land to the Israelites, there’s nothing in the Bible that talks about bloody conquest and might-makes-right as part of a Manifest Destiny for the United States. There’s nothing in Jesus’ words (or any other New Testament author) that indicates that military force should be used to exterminate those who don’t turn to Christ, or that treaties made with same can and should be broken.

The United States is not Palestine. Though I’m sure you’d prefer all the Muslims in this country have to flee to refugee camps.

Rahab, you will remember, was a Canaanite woman who lived in Jericho at the time of the Israelite conquest. She placed her faith in the God of Moses, rather than the gods of Canaan, provided material assistance to the coming settlers, and assimilated into the nation of Israel. She played a highly honored role in Israel’s history as a result, occupying a place in the bloodline that led both to King David and to Christ.

She had access to the same truth her follow Canaanites did, but she chose to embrace it while they rejected it. The results for her native countrymen were both avoidable and tragic.

Hey, Brian, maybe they didn’t agree that it was the truth.  The only proof that you seem to offer that it, in fact, was the truth was (a) the holy Scripture recorded by the winning side, and (b) that the Israelites won.  Hardly convincing, dude.

Alas, not enough of her fellow indigenous peoples were willing to follow in Rebecca’s footsteps, and a long and sordid trail of bloodshed and violence followed, which lasted until the turn of the 20th century.

Yes, the bloodshed and violence that followed until the turn of the 20th century was all the fault of those zany indigenous peoples and their unwillingness to assimilate. Who’d have thunk it?

But Rebecca, the former Pocahontas, showed us what could have been.

Perhaps if they’d known there would be a Disney movie in the offing for them, Bryan, they might have behaved differently.

*     *     *

Sometimes it seems curious as to why I spend so much time and effort fisking a dolt like Bryan Fischer.  I mean, the dude is clearly a fringe Right nut-job, right?

The problem is, Fischer is a prominent voice in various prominent conservative organizations, including his parent American Family Association.  Aside from the question of when he is/isn’t talking for the AFA, he is the voice (written and broadcast) of that group.  He appears on stage regularly with a variety of conservative movers and shakers.

In other words, he’s not a fringe nutjob.  He’s (God help us) a prominent part of the activist GOP base.

So the more I can heap scorn and ridicule upon his head, the greater the chance that someone, somewhere, might feel some doubt when Fischer is spewing his venom toward the gays, the Muslims, the Native Americans.  And to the extent that his beliefs and arguments are picked up and echoed by others, someone has to speak out against this lunatic.

Plus … it’s just too much fun.